Felix in the Underworld (14 page)

‘Then you will contact us at Paddington Green immediately. My DC will leave a telephone number which I will ask you to keep by you at all times. That right, Leonard?'

‘And if I don't?' Miriam challenged him.

Detective Sergeant Wathen sucked air through his teeth and shook his head again. ‘If you don't' – he looked sad – ‘we may have to change our view of your own involvement, Miriam.' He stood up, turned and dusted down the back of his raincoat with his hand, as though to get rid of any spillage from the armchair. ‘And, if you take my advice, you'll see that young lad is not out roaming the streets after five. This is not an official warning, as yet.'

After the police officers had gone, Miriam let Ian out of retreat. ‘If that bald-headed bastard ever comes in here again, don't you say a word to him!'

In the car Detective Constable Newbury said, ‘I wonder how she knew it was a spanner?'

‘That, Leonard' – the superior officer gave the ghost of a smile to indicate, quite falsely, that it was something he had noticed himself – ‘is a question you may well ask.'

‘You! Whoever you are, shitface! You get your arse out of there. That's Flo's place. I'm keeping it safe. Saving it for Flo. You fuck off out of it!'

Felix seemed hardly to have slept at all. A moment of blessed unconcern and then Peggy, the middle-aged woman, was pulling at his arm and cursing him horribly.

‘There wasn't anyone here.'

‘Course there wasn't. Flo's in hospital, isn't she? She won't tolerate that. Not indoors. Not stuck in a ward with tubes all pushed in her. She won't stay. The Queen of England couldn't make her stay. She'll want the fresh air. That's what she is used to, so you piss off. You creeping monkey. You slithering snake, you. Piss off out of it.'

‘Of course.' Felix rubbed his eyes, shook himself and stood up. ‘Of course, I'll move. I wouldn't want to take anyone's place.'

He had often tried politeness as a way of manipulating publishers, editors, even students. Never before had it had such a devastating effect. The witch-woman looked stunned. She ran her fingers through her hair so that it stood up in an even more Medusalike manner. Then she said, ‘Where are you from, anyway?'

‘Hospital.' Felix, at a loss, returned to his trade of creating fiction.

‘Hospital? You didn't see no sign of Flo there, did you?'

‘Oh, yes.' Felix was now at his ease. ‘I saw Flo. She said she wouldn't be out. Not for a couple of days at least.'

‘She wouldn't want to be in there. Not for a couple of days even. She always said she couldn't breathe in those places.' The Medusa's eyes narrowed. ‘How did you know it was Flo, anyway?'

‘Flo? Everyone knows Flo, don't they?'

‘I suppose they do. What else did Flo tell you?'

‘She said I could have her place. At least till she got back.'

‘Flo said that?'

‘You know Flo.' Felix found the dialogue flowing easily. ‘She'd give you her last fifty p. She'd do anything for a friend.'

‘Flo's got more than fifty p!' The woman laughed. ‘Where've you been sleeping? Up Lincoln's Inn Fields? Or the Kingsway?'

Felix opted for the Kingsway.

‘Dole office doorway?'

‘That's it. Of course I always wanted the chance of coming down here.'

‘Down here's better.'

‘Of course it is.'

‘Cleaner.'

‘That's what I think.'

‘Better class of person. More middle-aged and responsible.'

‘They're all young up the Kingsway,' Felix agreed.

‘Well, if you're staying, I'll get you Flo's sleeping-bag to lie on. You don't want to he on the cold stone.'

Felix was nervous of Flo's sleeping-bag, which, he imagined, would be a soggy item, saturated in urine and worse. But when it came, it looked as clean as when Flo had first spread it on the cold stone. He lay down on it gratefully. ‘You're very kind.'

‘Any friend of Flo's,' she told him. ‘Nothing else you want?'

‘One thing you can tell me. You never heard anything of a man called Gavin Piercey?'

Peggy shook her head. ‘Sleeps round here, does he?'

‘Possibly. Bloke with a maroon anorak. Sort of. . .' – Felix struggled for words to describe Gavin – ‘. . . pale and serious-looking.'

‘Gavin? Never heard of him.'

‘And those two men that stopped in a car?'

‘Never seen them before. Coppers from out of the area. Don't you worry your head about them.'

‘They showed that vicar a photograph in the paper.'

‘Showed Brian? His sandwiches is awful. God knows why he brings them.'

‘Did he recognize anyone?'

‘He didn't say. He knows we want nothing said to the police. Not about any of us.'

‘Did the others see the photograph? Did you?'

‘I didn't bother with it.' Peggy squatted on her haunches beside him. She had a strong individual smell of musk and mildew, the smell of damp churches, which he found he could cope with perfectly well. ‘Some may have had a glance at it. But we don't tell the coppers anything. Even when the taxmen beats us up.'

‘The taxmen?' Felix had a sudden, surprising vision of dark-suited Inland Revenue officials assaulting street-sleepers.

‘What lays claim to half your begging money and kicks it out of you. Not our age group. Surely you have taxmen up there?'

‘Oh, yes,' Felix remembered, ‘we've got plenty of them up the Kingsway.'

He dreamed that he was a boy again at Coldsands, sitting in the shallow water at the edge of the sea, feehng the dark, gritty sand being sucked away from under him as the waves retreated, and then they returned, high-crested and yellow-foaming, to cover his goose-pimpled body in a salt shower. He woke up to find Peggy yanking the sleeping-bag from under him and with hoses sluicing down the arcade as the sleepers picked up their belongings and skipped away from the advancing flood.

‘They're not attacking us,' the man in the bobble hat, his possessions neatly rolled, tied with string and lodged under his arm, reassured Felix. ‘They don't mean us any harm, you know. No harm at all. We just have to go when they start cleaning up. We'll all be back here this evening. You coming for a bite of breakfast?'

‘Where to?'

‘Weaver Street. Best breakfast in London.'

‘I haven't got any money.'

‘It's the order of St Agatha. They don't expect money. And, even if you had it, it's better to keep quiet about it. Take your stuff. Can't leave it here, you know.'

‘I'm afraid I haven't got any stuff either.'

‘What happened? Did the taxmen rob you?'

‘Yes,' Felix answered without difficulty, ‘that's what happened.'

The rain had stopped and there was sunshine above early morning mist so, as they crossed Waterloo Bridge, Somerset House and St Paul's seemed to be floating over the water. The bobble-hatted man, who had introduced himself as Esmond, walked with a staccato trot and Felix found it hard to keep up with him. Striding ahead of them on the bridge, silent and unaccompanied, carrying only the smallest, tightest bundle of belongings, was the ox-like young man he had seen by Brian's sandwich van.

‘There goes Dumbarton,' Esmond told him.

‘Is that his name?'

‘Probably just his address. Boy was in the army and when his time was over, you know, he couldn't cope. Used to doing everything at the word of command. Having it all laid on for him. Couldn't manage life on his own. What did you say your name was?'

‘I said it was Gavin.'

‘Unusual sort of name.'

‘Not really. There must be thousands of Gavins.'

‘Yes, I suppose there must be.'

Esmond had been right about the breakfast. There was bacon and egg on a fried slice, bread and marmalade and mugs of sweet tea which tasted nothing like soup. They ate at long tables in the crypt of an old Catholic church with the ageless nuns in white habits sailing between the rows of hungry dossers.

‘How long have you been on the streets?'

‘Not too long,' Felix confessed. ‘How about you?'

‘Coming up for five years.' Esmond was using his bread to mop up what was left of his egg, polishing the plate. He said, quite without boasting, ‘You won't believe this. I was manager of a supermarket in Bexley Heath.'

‘Made redundant? I know. They were slimming down the operation?'

‘No. I was married to a lovely girl. Sandra. Quite lovely. With a birthmark which I didn't mind at all, although she'd been teased at school about it. And our Barbara. Four years old. Well, of course, I'd have done anything for that Barbara: Died for her quite happily. Only it was her that had to die.' Esmond spoke quickly in the way he walked and quite cheerfully. Felix saw a yellow trickle of egg at the comer of his mouth and tried not to notice it.

‘Four years old. On her way home from nursery school with her mother. Drunk driver did for both of them on a pedestrian crossing in Henshaw Avenue. Chap who did it got six months. I got life. Or at least I thought I did.'

‘But you got over it?'

‘Took me four years. I went to Italian classes in the evening. Trying to forget my wife and daughter. Classes at the Adult Institute. That's where I met her. Lucrezia. Italian girl. Father was an ex prisoner of war and she worked in the National Assistance. She managed to convince me it was love at first sight. I found myself spending hours when I hardly remembered Sandra and young Barbara.'

A nun glided towards them with a huge tin teapot and refilled their mugs. Felix didn't feel that this was a story which was going to end happily, although Esmond was smiling as cheerfully as ever. ‘Six months,' he said. ‘That's how long it lasted. My Italian marriage. Then she went off with one of our suppliers. A traveller in toiletries. Well! That's it, I said. That does it. That just about puts the tin lid on it. I've had enough. I'm just not prepared to take any more. Know what I did?'

Felix didn't know.

‘I had a detached residence, mortgage nearly paid for. I had a Toyota and a job with a decent salary and I couldn't stand the sight of them any more. Not my home. Not my car. Not those crowds of people pushing wire wheelbarrows round my shop loaded up with stuff they never really wanted in the first place. So I locked up the house and posted the keys in through the letter-box. I spent the money I had on a train to Charing

Cross, a little bit of camping equipment and a bloody good dinner at Rules. Then I looked for a nice quiet doorway to sleep in. That was five years ago.'

‘And are you happy?' Felix couldn't believe it.

‘You think about surviving. That's all you think about. No bills. No rates. No wives. No children. Just how to keep warm and where to walk during the day. The days do seem long sometimes. How about you?'

‘What?'

‘Are you planning on going back to it?'

‘I don't know. I really don't know what's going to happen.'

Silence fell between them. To Felix's relief, Esmond took out a clean handkerchief and wiped the corners of his mouth. Then he lifted his mug of tea and looked at Felix over it.

‘I saw a photograph of you last night,' he said. ‘Members of the constabulary came and showed us a photograph of you in the paper.'

Felix felt he had gone through a door and stepped on nothing, space and a fall with no end, to nowhere.

‘They said they were looking for you and you'd been over in the telephone box.'

What could Felix say?

‘Your name's not Gavin, is it? Your name's Felix. Felix Morsom. You're a writer.'

If he kept quiet, Felix thought, it would soon be over. He drank tea and tried to look uninterested.

‘I read one of yours. Paperback. We had it in the rack at the checkout.
The End of the Pier.
'

‘Did you like it?' Felix wondered why he should care.

‘Very interesting. Could have done with a bit more sex and story in my humble opinion. They want a good bonk every three pages, to go with the groceries. You're not a supermarket author, quite honestly, are you, Felix?'

‘Please. Don't call me that.'

‘But that's your name, isn't it? You're not Gavin, are you?' Peggy and Dumbarton were eating far away at the other end of the long table. No one round them seemed to be listening. Felix looked at Esmond and decided to trust him.

‘No. Gavin's someone I knew. He was murdered.'

‘A bad business?' Esmond looked seriously concerned.

‘Bad for me. They think I did it.'

‘They?'

‘The police.'

‘You don't have the stamp of a murderer. Not to me.'

‘Thank you. I haven't murdered anyone. As a matter of fact, Gavin Piercey's not even dead. I saw him when Brian the vicar was handing out sandwiches. You remember him, don't you? Pale. With a turned-up nose. And a maroon anorak?'

‘As a matter of fact I
don't
remember. I was busy trying to identify the refreshment the Rev. Brian had on offer.'

‘Perhaps the others will?' Felix looked down the table. ‘At least they'll remember the anorak.'

‘I think you'll find their memories are miserably short, particularly when the police have shown an interest. I even find I've forgotten your name. Was it Gavin, did you say?'

Felix leant forward and tried to say as quietly as possible, ‘Will you help me find him?'

‘Why?'

‘Well, if he's alive I can't have killed him, can I?'

Esmond thought about it. ‘A bit of a tall order. London's a big place. Needle in a haystack job.'

‘But he's with . . . well. . . people like you. He was eating on the street. It looks as though he wants to keep hidden. At least from me. He seems to want to disappear.'